The Struggle to Help Homeless People Who Don’t Want Help
MINNEAPOLIS—Richard Byington spent years living under a highway. He wasn’t sure he wanted to stay in his new apartment.
“It looks like a prison bed,” he said, eyeing the twin bed during his first visit. Being indoors reminded him of being incarcerated, as did voices he frequently heard.
He had agreed to the new, heavily subsidized unit, but also said he preferred being outside. His longtime social worker, Sara Majeres, drove him 3.3 miles back to his underpass.
Combatting a record-setting U.S. homeless crisis requires overcoming a big challenge: Not all homeless people want housing or other help—at least at first. Trauma, mental illness and drug addiction are often the reasons.
Homelessness can sometimes cause, or worsen, such issues, creating treatment needs that go beyond housing. These complications are often seen among the chronically homeless, a population subset of people who are persistently without a home and have a disability, such as mental illness. This group nationally reached an estimated 154,300 people counted on a single night last year, out of about 653,100 homeless people.
There are no easy ways to compel help for those who say no. State laws broadly allow forced care only when people put themselves or others in serious danger.
But there is a hard option: taking on the painstaking work of finding them, developing relationships and nudging them toward better circumstances.
Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, has strengthened efforts to tackle homelessness and is taking on more of this hands-on work. The county still has a major challenge, inflated in recent years by rising family homelessness after pandemic-era financial protections wore off.
But the county has seen some successes, too. It spent roughly $7 million in federal pandemic aid on a new push that, since early 2022, has gotten about 1,350 people into housing. This step can serve as a prelude to broader treatment.
“We don’t take no for an answer, we take it as a starting point for negotiations,” said David Hewitt, the county’s director of housing stability. The county has hired several dozen staffers who spend more time trying to get people housed, including chronically homeless people such as Byington.
One of those workers is Majeres, who started working with Byington in February on a long, slow effort to try to get him back indoors.
Not interested
A small man with Lakota heritage, Byington had spent years living around an interstate underpass on the edge of downtown Minneapolis.
He liked to clean public spaces, weeding and scrubbing bird droppings from surfaces around the Basilica of St. Mary. He said it was a way to “put some goodness back into the world” he has otherwise affected through numerous crimes. Records show a long list of felony convictions, many for burglary.
“It’s my next life I’m trying to save,” he said.
He had been through other outreach workers and passed on prior housing opportunities. Majeres, 47 years old, who grew up just outside the city, wondered what she could accomplish when she took him on as a new client.
“He’s not interested in housing,” she thought at first. “So what am I doing?”
She quickly learned Byington had a short fuse and could only engage for about 20 minutes at a time before getting restless. So she focused on basic goals and practical solutions. This included getting him a pair of gently worn Asics sneakers, donated by one of her three brothers, because Byington covered a lot of ground walking the neighborhood.
He would open up about his troubled background on drives, and it became clearer how being indoors felt like forced confinement to him. Majeres was willing to play the long game until he felt more comfortable.
“I’d be a horrible sales person,” she said. “I respect no.”
“She was letting me do it myself,” Byington said.
But Majeres also slowly reframed the concept of housing. She liked the property Byington eventually accepted, and thought he’d appreciate the outdoor spaces there. She talked about teaching him to cook.
The day before Byington’s move, Majeres drove around his underpass, looking for him, with a Wall Street Journal reporter and photographer in tow. She wanted to make sure he was ready to be picked up the next morning, and he was proving hard to find. He already had skipped a scheduled move-in the prior week, and missing another would be bad.
“I was told this was our last attempt” for this apartment, Majeres said.
During an unsuccessful search along a weedy embankment, she hoped he would see her face as she called out his name.
“He doesn’t know with the sounds if they’re real or not,” Majeres said.
On edge
Byington said he has heard voices since he was a child, but he didn’t start to really understand what they were until much more recently. They often sounded like a conversation between other people discussing things he said he experienced, such as prison riots and getting stabbed.
Majeres, who grew up in a working class family, nannied for years before shifting to social work a decade ago. She said she was inspired by the movie “Lean on Me,” about a principal who helps improve a failing high school.
Her day-to-day schedule can be chaotic, covering a mix of people she works with long-term, such as Byington, and those she meets doing outreach work around the area.
Over the course of a few days, she tried to check on a recently housed person who was still struggling with addiction, and wouldn’t answer the door. She tracked down 53-year-old Patrick McGhee, who was recovering from a stroke, in an encampment behind a Walgreens after he missed an appointment at a branch library.
She also spends time finding homeless people to help, including on the region’s light-rail system. She met 36-year-old Nick Kiecker, who was homeless and said he struggled with substances, on a train platform and told him how to apply for basic benefits.
No guarantee
Still searching for Byington, hoping to prepare him for the next-day’s move, Majeres finally spotted him near a technical college. He was scraping weeds from the sidewalk with a metal trowel.
“Yes, that’s him!” Majeres said, pulling her Subaru off to the side.
“Tomorrow the move in is at 10:30,” she reminded him. She talked up the apartment some more, including his private bathroom and kitchen. He would finally have a mailing address.
Byington still sounded unready. “I’ve been locked up all my life, man, I don’t want to be inside.”
“Move in and if it’s not your jam after a while, it’s not your jam,” Majeres said.
“This is all hopefulness, there’s no guarantee that it’s going to happen,” she added after their brief visit. “I don’t want to force him.”
Majeres got off to a good start the next morning, finding Byington easily, and they drove up to the tan-and-red brick apartment building together. He had a slushy drink she’d promised they’d get along the way.
All the apartments there were for single adults, often people right off the street with serious underlying mental-health issues.
There are caseworkers on site, too. Although help for issues such as mental illness and addiction are voluntary, partaking is crucial, said Caroline Hood, chief executive at RS Eden, the nonprofit that owns and runs the site.
“Without those services, they struggle,” Hood said.
In his small efficiency-size unit, Byington collected some items from a welcome kit of basic food and kitchenware to bring back to his underpass. Crackers. A can of Spam. Dish soap to clean bird droppings, he said. He also picked up a large kitchen knife, but decided to leave it.
Majeres talked about using sage to help cleanse the apartment, a Native American tradition. Byington liked that idea.
Standing outside, he said he felt like Majeres understood him.
“She’s like my fourth housing worker,” he said. Asked for a ranking, he said: “top one.”
Apartment living didn’t take right away. He stayed at his underpass for a while, but eventually started showing up to the new home on his own. Steadily, he started sleeping there, though he returned by day to clean around the basilica. He started riding the bus, something that previously made him feel self-conscious due to his appearance while he lived outside.
Majeres visited him every Thursday, and they cooked a pot roast together. Later, he cooked the same meal himself.
He was still bothered by voices, sometimes hearing threats of harm, and they kept him on edge. Majeres suggested he lock and barricade his door to feel safer.
But he also expressed willingness to get help. He had tried prescription medication in prison that made him sick, and said he was leery of trying again. Therapy, though, was on the table.
“There’s stuff I need to get off my chest,” he said.
He hadn’t used the bed. Instead, he said, he was sleeping in a cardboard shelter on the floor.
Source: The Wall Street Journal. Write to Jon Kamp at Jon.Kamp@wsj.com
